HOMELAND

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Where: Showtime.

For some fans of “Homeland,” Showtime’s high-power series went from thrill ride in Season 1 to bizarre land last season. Not that it wasn’t fun — it was. And Claire Danes, who just won her second Emmy for playing bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison, was terrific, but the plotting was eccentric.

At the beginning of this its third season, former POW and Carrie’s lover Nicholas Brody (Damiam Lewis) is gone — presumed dead — and responsible for blowing up CIA headquarters. Meanwhile, Carrie is dealing with the fallout for her actions as her mentor, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), tries to lead the damaged agency, searching for answers and aiming at retribution.

“Carrie is always sitting on her own personal ticking bomb,” notes Danes about her character. Like everyone else involved in the series, she isn’t giving many specifics about the new season.

“It’s pretty bleak in the beginning,” Dane says. “She’s gone off her meds for all sorts of reasons.”

Lewis’ Brody isn’t in the first two episodes, but he will be back. It was strictly a function of the story, say the producers, pointing out that he is on the lam and people are looking for him.

“When you do see Brody, what will be of interest to the audience is what state will he be in,” Lewis says.

Teasingly he jokes: “Will he be on a yacht off the Côte d’Azure surrounded by a bevy of Russian beauties?”

Executive producer Alex Gansa says one of the themes of Season 3 is the emotional cost that is extracted by being an intelligence agent.

“I think Saul and Carrie are the prime examples of that. As a result of the attack last year, the CIA itself is on trial,” Gansa said. “That is an agency that couldn’t even protect itself. How should it be expected to protect the country?”

Though Brody is gone, the producers also have chosen to keep following his estranged family — Jessica (Morena Baccarin), Dana (Morgan Saylor) and Chris (Jackson Pace) — a decision some critics have questioned. Gansa defends it, saying that after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing, the show’s writers noted that family members were being paraded in front of the cameras.

“It felt like a very good avenue to explore, how this would reverberate down on the family,” Gansa said.

But the “Homeland” producers wouldn’t say if they planned any “Game of Thrones” Red Wedding sequence where they would kill off some key characters.

“These guys have been trying to kill me since the end of Episode 1,” Lewis quips. “I’m on a stay of execution. I don’t know for how much longer.”

Danes didn’t sound like she expected to be gone anytime soon, jokes she would stay until the end (when “Carrie became a hairdresser in Ohio”). The actress did not see Anne Hathaway’s Carrie on “Saturday Night Live” spoof of “Homeland” last season, but says she was flattered by it.

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“To be parodied on ‘SNL’ means, ‘Oh, boy, we are relevant,’” she says. “‘We’re in the zeitgeist. We’re cool, cool enough to make fun of.’”